While researching the life and career of Jamaican-born poet Claude McKay (1889-1948), LAS English professor William Maxwell found startling evidence of this country's investigation into black radicalism. The "canonically bold poet" who against all odds and his own deleterious tendencies came to inspire such Harlem Renaissance writers as Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston and James Weldon Johnson was the subject of a 100-page FBI file.
"It seems crazy that this is happening so early, but the FBI even in the 1920s is fascinated and upset by the possibility of a left-leaning black radicalism in the United States," says Maxwell, who just edited an anthology of the poet's works. "And J. Edgar Hoover, this young prosecutor attached to the FBI, even then is spearheading this effort, and he's actually reading McKay's poems."
McKay, the grandson of a West African slave would produce a unique and avant-garde body of work—ballads, sonnets, stories, novels, memoirs and political commentary. He rose to fame in his early 20s for his Jamaican "dialect" poetry, and in the early years of his literary career, he benefited greatly from a succession of mentors, including Max Eastman, the editor-in-chief of the socialist monthly, the Liberator.
Among his credits: a sonnet, "If We Must Die" (1919), which became the anthem for black social resistance and later was used by Winston Churchill as a rallying cry for World War II; a collection of poetry, Harlem Shadows (1922), widely considered one of the works that launched the Harlem Renaissance; and a controversial novel, Home to Harlem (1928), generally regarded as the first best-selling novel by a black man.
McKay immigrated to America in 1912, restlessly roamed the globe—setting up households in Barcelona, London, Moscow, New York, and Paris, and several cities in Morocco—and eventually became a U.S. citizen in 1940. The first leading black author to become seriously involved with the world communist movement, and an important figure in that movement as a theorist and a professional revolutionary, McKay also was among the first important literary anti-Stalinists, becoming "an anti-communist in the 1930s just when the heart of literary Harlem was embracing communism," Maxwell says.
McKay bounced from job to job, country to country, never quite eluding the wolf at the door. In the 1940s, his health deteriorated, and to the amazement of friends, he exchanged his entrenched agnosticism for Catholicism. He died in Chicago, his home for the last four years of his life.
Despite his picaresque life and writings, McKay is not as famous today as his literary heirs, Hughes and Hurston. Even so, he is consistently anthologized in standard collections of American literature and taught in higher education. "It's a rare course on modern black poetry or on the Harlem Renaissance that doesn't feature some of his sonnets from ‘Harlem Shadows,' " Maxwell says.
Looking at McKay's FBI file has led Maxwell to his next project: "studying the relationship between modern black writing and the FBI more generally. The FBI read Langston Hughes and Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin intensely, and produced voluminous literary criticism about them."
Maxwell concedes that scholars have been interested in the relationship between black radicalism and the FBI for a long time—it didn't begin with the FBI's interest in Martin Luther King Jr.
"But the relationship with McKay is much earlier and is significantly literary, and so we have a phenomenon in which the FBI becomes a shaping reader of black literature. Thus, I want to look at the relationship—the surprising intimacy between black writing and the FBI—and trace it out across the century and see what I can learn there."
